Olya Irzak

Few people look at scary climate disasters like the permafrost releasing methane and say “I can do something about that”. Olya is one of those people. Read on to find out about how she went from Google to the Arctic and founded her company Frost Methane.

“There's very few of us that have the privilege to work on essentially whatever we want. I think taking a bit of a risk for something that you really care about in the long term is an excellent trade off.”

Let’s start with your story. How did you start working on climate solutions?

I was pretty motivated. When I decided to work in climate change, I was doing my masters in computer science. I would knock on the door of any professor who was doing climate change research, and ask them where I could apply computer science to the problem. I then found a job with Google.org on a grid project and learned a huge amount on the job, both from my group and adjacent climate projects at Google. I went to awesome meetup groups in the Bay Area, such as ClimateLink, Data Science for Sustainability, E-Discuss, Watt it takes, etc’ where I learned much more about startups tackling climate issues. I also started a group called Witnesses of Climatology where I bring in speakers from more obscure areas of climate change, like green roofs, industrial decarbonization, clean hydrogen and clean concrete. 

I like to bring in speakers on the full range of topics because it’s more likely that you can have an impact and come up with unique ideas in sub areas that aren’t thought about as much. One framework I have for thinking about impact is to take the size of the problem divided by the number of people working on it, multiplied by some chance of success. Using that framework, obscure large problems may be the most fruitful areas to work in.

That’s a great framework. So tell us about the company you launched?

If you're looking for the cheapest way of mitigating climate change, you might look for a very potent gas that is cheap to get rid of, for example by burning it. And then you would want to look for a high flow of that gas. I was also looking for something that did not have a lot of market friction. For example, retrofitting a house is negative money per ton of CO2, but the friction is very high. You have to convince a large number of people to take action. 

Carbon markets are hitting a turning point. There’s only ~$5B / year flowing through them, but there is regulatory certainty, and more jurisdictions, sectors, individuals and companies are taking part - so they’re growing rapidly. Carbon markets are fundamentally incentivizing competition about who can mitigate climate change the cheapest.

Bringing these two ideas together - how we can mitigate climate change the cheapest, and where is a concentrated gas to burn - I started looking at concentrated methane releases from the permafrost. The thing that triggered it was an article in the Siberian times (which I do not read on a regular basis!) about how methane was coming out of the permafrost in concentrated rather than diffuse ways, like from a vent. And I just thought, we can burn that and scale it through carbon markets. Plus measuring the flow has scientific value - so surely wasn’t a waste of time.

I reached out to a couple of friends, Ethan Chaleff and Laughlin Barker, who are amazing, and we built the first prototype of a mechanical and electrical monitoring system to do it. This was a side project, completely on my money, and our free time.

“The first time we failed, a year later, we succeeded.”

Photo: Testing out the original prototype on the first trip to the Arctic.

Wait, so you just built the hardware to burn methane over these vents?

Yeah, we went out to an arctic methane vent, just past the arctic circle with Katey Walter Anthony’s group at University of Alaska at Fairbanks and tried to install it. The first time we failed, a year later, we succeeded. The Arctic field season is quite short, so we had to wait until the following year. 

Very few people see methane coming out of the permafrost and say ‘I can go burn that’ and head off to the Arctic. What did that take?

The academic network is amazing. We contacted Katey Walter Anthony from the University of Alaska Fairbanks. She’s one of the leading academics in this. We asked her if she was going on an expedition and whether we could join, paying for ourselves of course. There was some real scientific benefit in the measurements that we could take which was complementary to their research. 

In May of that year, Katey said that if we could build the device and be ready by August, we could join the expedition. We all had full-time jobs, so worked only evenings and weekends to build the device, but that was the point where it became real, there was a small opportunity and encouragement that what we were doing would be useful. We shortcut all the logistic understanding by working with Katey. Also, there was a deadline, deadlines are an amazing invention.

So it started out as a side-project, at what point did you leave your job?

As a side project, it would take years to prove out anything while depriving our crew of any free time. I knew that if we wanted to do this for real, it had to be a real organization. My CEO was very supportive of entrepreneurship; initially I reduced my time to three days a week. I left my job fully three or four months after the expedition. By then I had done enough thinking and had enough understanding of the business model, had non arctic sites lined up, and knew we could have a shot at economically scalable climate change mitigation

“we could have a shot at economically scalable climate change mitigation”

Photo: Permafrost

It’s so important for people to hear how you de-risked it, often there is this idea that you need to make a huge change in one day. 

More often than not people move slowly at the start. For someone who's thinking about making a transition, know that there are ways to take a step back at work, without leaving stability entirely.

In large companies there is also extra-curricular sustainability work that you can do. Outside of work, there are boards of nonprofits and volunteer work. There are so many ways of getting familiar with the field before diving in.

What would you say to people who want to transition to climate focused work today?

The first thing is that the people are worth it. Everybody that I meet anywhere in the clean tech space is outstanding. They're just spectacular people. So if nothing else, you'll be surrounding yourself with some really, really great people. 

The second thing is I don’t think there is a trade off between career trajectory and climate impact, because it combines passion with work. Even if I work 40 hours a week, I go home and read about climate and immerse myself in it. I see opportunities and trends before they happen. 

For me, it's a question of what I want to do 40 hours a week. This is really philosophical but I was born in the Soviet union. So having a middle of the road engineering salary here is like I've won the lottery already. I'm not optimizing for salary, but optimizing to make the world better, to preserve biodiversity and to make it easier for the people that will be handling these effects, that’s what’s important to me.

There's very few of us that have the privilege to work on essentially whatever we want. Whether it's climate change or homelessness or health or education or whatever people care about. I think taking a bit of a risk for something that you really care about in the long term is an excellent trade off. 

Lastly, we have emissions coming from every piece of the economy. It's the same skill sets that make the economy run today that are needed to transition to net zero. The fear that you won’t be able to make an impact is false. There's lots of open head count today for almost any skill set in the climate world. 

“Emissions come from every piece of the economy. You need to break it down into smaller, solvable problems.”

What do you think is the difference between people who see climate change as a  formidable thing that they can't do anything about and people who dive in to fix it?

That's a fantastic question. Climate change is so big. Emissions come from every piece of the economy. You need to break it down into smaller, solvable problems. If a company like mine can mitigate 1%, then we just need one hundred companies to solve climate change.

What if it’s only 0.1% per company? Then we need a thousand companies to solve climate change right. And if one out of every ten companies fail, then fine, we need 10,000 companies. It's still a small number.

I go to meetups and interact with the CEOs of companies working on climate, it's easy for me to see that some of them could make at a 1% difference if they were successful. I now know a hundred of them and that's just in San Francisco. I'm sure if I go to New York, I’d meet another hundred.

I love so much about what you've just said, that it's about being part of the network that each takes the 0.1% or 1% and makes that happen. Thank you.